On 10 June 2022, Anthony Barraclough (AKA Ant Barra), based in Shoreditch, East London, was jailed for six years for terrorism and public order offences, having admitted to three counts of disseminating terrorist publications and seven counts of distributing materials to incite racial hatred between November 2020 and February 2021.
HOPE not hate can reveal that during this period, Barraclough was an active member of Britain First’s Eastern branch, protesting outside of hotels alleged to be housing migrants and accompanying leader Paul Golding to the Millwall stadium in December 2020 to support fans who booed the taking of the knee by their team. Barraclough was a regular at Britain First’s activities up until May 2021, even donning the black uniform of the Defence group. He continued to post on Britain First’s chat group after he stopped public activity.
The extremist continued to post terror-related content on a number of fascist Telegram groups after his arrest. For example, in May 2021 he posted a meme featuring Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who murdered nine Black worshippers in a Charleston church in 2015, which made reference to “total n**ger death” [slur words starred out by us].
In July that year, he posted a video that appeared to show Muslims worshipping in a park, writing: “Wheres daren Osborne when u need him 😆”, referring to the terrorist who drove a van into a crowd outside a mosque in Finsbury Park, London, in 2017, killing one. Barraclough has also described the rapper Eminem as a “n**gerlover” and posted images featuring anti-Black stereotypes.
When searching his home, police found a black flag bearing a Celtic Cross symbol, widely used by white supremacists around the globe. Detective Chief Superintendent Dominic Murphy, of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, said: “Barraclough posted appalling racist material online, with the intention of encouraging others to adopt his extremist views and hatred of black people.”
Barraclough has also expressed support for Patriotic Alternative (PA), the UK’s largest neo-Nazi organisation, and was active in fascist fitness groups on Telegram, including PA’s own chat. Attending the January 2022 demonstration headed by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) in Telford, West Midlands, Barraclough wrote: “Meet some good lads from PA today was a pleasure boys”, expressing his disappointment at the lack of violence at the event.
Carl Burgess is Britain First’s Wales Regional Organiser and one of its three candidates in the 2022 local elections, standing in Rhondda Cynon Taf (Bryanna and Llanharan ward), ultimately coming in last place.
Burgess, who took the RO role in December 2020, is also a conspiracy theorist who has repeatedly recommended the notorious, highly antisemitic Holocaust denial documentary Europa: The Last Battle on social media.
In April 2020, Burgess wrote on a far-right chat group on Telegram: “Jews wanna take over the world I watched a documentary”. He continued: “Did you see Europa the last battle? I don’t hate jews really but they do seem extra quiet… a little too quiet.” Three weeks earlier, he had written in the same group: “I recommend you go to [the video sharing site] bitchute and watch Europa: the last battle. Shit is crazy, its scarily accurate to what the modern world is becoming right now. It’s a 12 part series but honestly give it a go”.
In May 2020, he took to the social media platform VK to again promote the video, which claims that both world wars were part of a Jewish plot and exculpates the Nazi regime. This time, Burgess wrote: “it’s a real eye opener to what is happening today from books which were written 100 years ago. THIS IS WHATS HAPPENING IN OUR WORLD TODAY!!!”
In April 2020, Burgess also posted a clip from the 1998 film American History X in which a gang Nazi skinheads embark on an appalling racist rampage in a grocery store, brutally assaulting the staff. Alongside the video, Burgess wrote: “I’m no nazi but I’m sure a few of us can relate. I watched this yesterday for the first time in about 10 years. This is now happening here fucking crazy”. He continued:
“Instead if blacks its muslims over here who are a major problem [… ] the time for talking is over it’s not getting us anywhere. I really wouldnt want to go around hurting people its disgusting but what else could we do to send a message. We need to make suggestions that will really make a difference because protesting seems a waste of time to me”.
Carl Burgess
More recently, in August 2021, while an appointed official within Britain First, he wrote: “So there [sic] bringing people over to massacre us? British politicians are more than happy to let them do this obviously. Time to get armed people, seriously now”.
Burgess has elsewhere reposted conspiratorial screeds outlining a supposed plot to usher in a “New World Order” via vaccines, 5G technology and “herds of immigrants” entering the UK, ultimately facilitating the “mass extermination of us, introduction of a one world government, introduction of nanochip injections and total financial control of YOU and a Marxist style ruling done by credit worthiness”.
In recent years, Andy Frain has emerged as one of Britain First’s most active members. A member of the Britain First Defence group, the Chelmsford, Essex-based activist has attended numerous actions across the country and campaigned in during the 2022 local elections, even attending the vote count alongside Golding and Simon in Salford. His activity in Britain First earned him an “Elite Activist” award at the 2021 annual camp.
However, for many years Frain was one of the UK’s most violent and notorious football hooligans. A leading member of the infamous Chelsea Headhunters gang, Frain has dozens of convictions, mostly for violence and drunken behaviour but also importing drugs, burglary, assaulting a police officer and other offences.
Nicknamed “Nightmare”, Frain has been associated with the Headhunters since the early 1980s. Earning a fearsome reputation, by 1995 he was one of only two hooligans in Britain to be banned from travelling abroad to watch Chelsea and England.
Frain was also immersed in the UK’s extreme right during a particularly violent period in the 1990s, joining the Nazi terror group Combat 18 (C18) on its inception. Named after Adolf Hitler (the digits 1 and 8 representing his initials), the group terrorised minoritised communities and political opponents for a decade.
Frain was also a member of the British chapter of the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), even travelling to the US for training, only to be deported for violence. Frain was also at the centre of a brawl at an event organised by Blood & Honour, the Nazi skinhead music scene.
Frain featured prominently in a 1999 BBC documentary into the Headhunters, in which he was covertly filmed boasting about slashing an off-duty police officer with a knife. Jason Marriner, another Chelsea hooligan, was filmed claiming that he and Frain had travelled to the death camp Auschwitz and posed for a photo performing Nazi salutes. In Marriner’s words:
“I quickly took the photo [of Frain saluting] and a Polish geezer started crying. I think I put the final nail in the coffin when I tried to get into the oven.”
In December 2000, Frain and Marriner were handed seven and six year sentences respectively for planning violence at a football match and attempting to disrupt a march to commemorate Bloody Sunday, alongside C18 thugs; the pair were described by the judge as “dangerous” men who “relish violence”. Marriner has also been photographed with Britain First leader Paul Golding in recent years.
Throughout the 2000s, Frain continued his far-right activity and maintained contact with Charlie Sargent, the former leader of C18 and a convicted murderer.
In 2006, Frain was jailed again after he was hired to threaten a victim of assault with violence if he did not drop charges. In 2011, Frain was yet again convicted for violent disorder for his involvement in a clash between Chelsea and Cardiff hooligans, turning up to court swigging a bottle of vodka. In 2013, Frain found himself behind bars once more for his organising role in a mass brawl in Glasgow.
He now travels the country as a key member of the Britain First Defence team.
It is a mainstay of Britain First’s rhetoric that immigration, multiculturalism and liberal values are the primary drivers of crime and violence in the UK. However, this narrative is somewhat undermined by leader Paul Golding’s own family history, especially that of his younger brother Jamie.
Among the group’s regular activists and a member of the Britain First Defence security team, Jamie Golding has travelled the country in support of Britain First activities, regularly appearing in the Britain First Defence uniform at public events. Yet the younger Golding’s history of criminality is shocking in its scale, occurring at a time when his brother was a rising star in the BNP and lived just a few streets away from him.
The younger Golding made national news in 2002 when he and five accomplices, part of a gang known as the “Slade Green Massive”, were served with Anti-Social Behaviour Orders for a two-year reign of terror against residents of the Slade Green area that included carjackings and violent assaults. Having spent months on the run after skipping bail, he would later be sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for his role in a crime ring that stole vehicles and property to the value of £300,000 over a five month period.
Shortly after his release, Golding would immediately embark on another staggering crime spree. In 2006, he and an accomplice pled guilty to 171 burglaries on homes across South East London and Kent, carrying out up to six burglaries per day and netting an estimated £1.9 million pounds worth of property, of which only £1.2 million was recovered by police.
Geoff Miles is perhaps Britain First’s longest-serving Regional Organiser, having helmed the Eastern branch since 2019. Miles has travelled across the country for Britain First actions, and was also one of two Britain First officials selected to stand as a candidate in the 2019 local elections. Miles’ status as a trusted activist was such that he accompanied Golding on one of his trips to Russia in October 2020.
Miles is also a hardline racist, promoting the bunk “white genocide” conspiracy theory on social media, using the slur word “P*ki” and much else. In a particularly vile rant in February this year, he wrote [slur words starred out by us]:
“I find watching the Winter Olympics so refreshing . Haven’t seen one Black competitor and therefore zero whinging Negroes crying into their fried chicken that they’ve been racially abused. No Muslim screaming Allah Akhbar and beheading a child.But then all the events require skill and dedication and brainwork so that counts the Black and P*ki out.They are far better suited to the summer olympics where all they have to do is run in straight line.”
Geoff Miles
The same month he also wrote “British justice is great if you’re a murdering P*ki”, and in April this year, referred to people of dual heritage as “Wooly haired Hybrids”. He also claimed that Oswald Mosely, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was “a man before his time and a Great one!”
Miles has a history of such outbursts. For example, in May 2020 he reposted propaganda bearing the words “Destroy Islam, save humanity”, and the same month a picture of Theresa May hanging from a gallows, alongside pictures of former Prime Ministers David Cameron, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, writing: “Traitorous Bastards. Hanging is too good for this scum.”
Expressing his contempt for law enforcement, he wrote in November 2020:
“Britain’s Police Force…..What a pathetic bunch of useless impotent Monkies. Expert at persecuting innocent members of the White English Community but complete Cowards when it comes to arresting knife wielding Africans and Murdering Muslims.Yellow Wankers!”
Geoff Miles
Miles has been conspicuously absent from Britain First events since January this year, indicating that he may no longer hold an organising role, although he has previously claimed, in a 2020 video: “I’ll always be a member of Britain First, long after I’ve stopped being an activist”, continuing: “I believe in Britain First and I believe in Paul Golding”. His current profile on the social media platform VK continues to declare: “I stand with Paul Golding and all members of Britain First in fighting oppression and injustice against our own people.”
Nick Scanlon, a relative newcomer to Britain First, represented the group in the 2022 local elections, ultimately placing sixth of seven candidates in the Eltham Page ward of Greenwich. However, the South London-based activist, who is now at the forefront of Britain First in the South East, has cycled through a number of fascist groups over the past decade.
In 2014, Scanlon stood as a candidate for the BNP in Greenwich (Middle Park and Sutcliffe ward), placing 11th of 12 candidates. Scanlon appears to have maintained his affection for the fascist group, writing in 2018 that the party had been the “real deal”. In February 2020, he even met the disgraced former leader and notorious Holocaust denier, Nick Griffin, for a beer.
Scanlon was also a core member of Generation Identity UK (GI UK), a now defunct far-right youth group active between 2017 and 2019 that advocated for a form of racial segregation. Scanlon was more extreme than many of his GI contemporaries, for example repeatedly promoting propaganda from the neo-Nazi Mark Collett during this time.
In May 2019, Scanlon attended the white nationalist American Renaissance conference in the hope of forging links between US racists and GI UK, and also attended events by the Traditional Britain Group, a far-right pseudo-intellectual conference and key networking event for the UK far right.
After GI UK folded in January 2020, Scanlon claimed on Telegram that that he had joined Patriotic Alternative (PA), a highly antisemitic, fascist group headed by Collett, and joined the internal chat of the group’s South East branch. Scanlon has since joined Identity England (IE), a microscopic GI splinter group that launched in October 2020. He remains active in the racial separatist organisation, despite his role in Britain First.
Scanlon has produced a steady stream of racism on social media, for example writing in 2019:
“You can ban as many knives & films as you wish. The reality is nothing is going to change until the primitive culture which has been bought to our shores & allowed to flourish is #remigrated from our once tranquil and harmonious nation. Resist the Africanization of our cities!”
Nick Scanlon
In May 2021, he also wrote of Black Lives Matter activist Sasha Johnson, who had suffered severe brain injuries from a gunshot: “ideally she should be remigrated back to her native homeland – but none the less [sic] watching “right wingers” wishing her a speedy recovery is quite frankly, pathetic.”
After HOPE not hate exposed his comments in the local press this May, Britain First polled its followers, asking: “Do you agree with Britain First candidate Nick Scanlon that BLM leader Sasha Johnson should be deported?”, with 98% answering yes.
Mason Yates from Widnes, Cheshire pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in June 2022 for possessing instructions on how to make explosives from Telegram. Yates, now 19-years-old, was in the Prevent programme at age 13. According to a support worker, Yates claimed: “I have not been radicalised, I would be the one radicalising other people” and “I am as far-right as you can be”.
Yates was an active member in Britain First and is pictured at protests outside of hotels housing migrants in Warrington and in the North West of England.
Yates explicitly identifies himself as a Britain First activist and is friends with several high ranking Britain First members on social media, including Ashlea Simon, Paul Golding, Geoff Miles and Sam Cochrane.
In addition to the terror offences, Yates was convicted of possession of an extreme pornographic image.
For more information on Britain First, check out our Britain First report.
HOPE not hate reveals two more extremist candidates from Reform UK, in the latest of a string of embarrassments for the party UPDATE: Just hours…
